James Ivings and his co-founder Danielle Johnson built Leave Me Alone while traveling full-time and running a small web agency called Squarecat. It was not their first product. They had already shipped a menu-bar app called UptimeBar and worked through an earlier startup that did not take off, and those attempts taught them to build things that solved their own annoyances, validate early, and share their numbers in public.

Leave Me Alone launched in January 2019 with a simple promise: see every email subscription in one view and unsubscribe in one click, without selling anyone's data. The debut went well, finishing as the number one product of the day and the week on Product Hunt and bringing in about $1,186 in the first month. Early pricing was one-time credit packages of roughly $3 to $10, which was fair for customers but unpredictable for the founders, who were still paying the bills with freelance client work.

Through 2019 the product ticked along at around $500 a month. The turning point was a deliberate shift toward recurring revenue: they leaned into subscription plans aimed at people and teams, quit freelancing in January 2021 to focus on the product, and kept refining the unsubscribe experience. By March 2023 they were at roughly $5,000 MRR, and they wrote openly about the slow climb from a few hundred dollars a month to a real business.

What sets this story apart is the radical transparency. From day one every metric, revenue, profit, expenses, signups, even emails processed, has been visible on their open page, recorded through Stripe and tracked in Airtable so they control the data. That openness doubled as marketing: it built trust with privacy-conscious users and pulled in steady word of mouth. A single viral TikTok in 2022 added thousands of signups and a few hundred dollars of MRR in two days, a reminder that organic moments compound on top of a product people actually recommend.

By late 2025 the open page showed MRR around $10,000, with annual revenue of roughly $93,000 reported for the 2024 period and signups well past 400,000. It is a deliberately small, profitable, founder-controlled business rather than a venture rocket, and that was always the point.